The Ten Heifers I Thanked by Name

The Groom’s Side Always Pays

Marcie had the banquet menu spread across the table at the lake lodge before Hope and I even got our coats off, and she was tapping the second page with one painted fingernail.

“The plated prime rib for a hundred and fifty,” she said. “The chicken is what you serve people who count pennies, and I will not have pennies counted at my daughter’s rehearsal.”

Hope reached under the table and found my knee. She has done that for thirty-six years, every time she thinks I am about to say something plain.

I did not say anything plain. I looked out the tall windows at the water and let the woman talk.

“Now, the rehearsal dinner is traditionally the groom’s side,” Marcie said. She folded her hands like a bank teller. “The groom’s side always pays. That is just how it is done, Wendell. I assumed you knew.”

I did know. My own daddy paid for the rehearsal supper when I married Hope, forty people in the church basement, ham and scalloped potatoes, and he thought that was a fine spread.

“A hundred and fifty,” I said. “That is a lot of people, Marcie.”

“It is a small wedding,” she said, and she smiled at me the way you smile at a man who has mud on his boots in a carpeted room. “I trimmed the list myself.”

We run cattle in the Flint Hills, down below Cottonwood Falls where the limestone comes up through the grass and the pastures go green and tall in June. I am fifty-eight years old. I have paid for a lot of things in my life by selling something I would rather have kept.

Dale, our son, was marrying her daughter Katie in three weeks. Katie is a sweet girl, quiet, a teacher down in Emporia, and she looks at Dale like he hung the moon over the lake. I would have sold the whole place for that girl if Dale asked.

“We will take care of it,” I told Marcie. “You pick what you want.”

She picked the prime rib. She picked the open bar and the string lights and the lake-view room with the glass doors. She ordered it all while I sat there, and she never once asked me what any of it cost.

Hope squeezed my knee one more time on the way out the door.

“You are quiet,” she said in the truck.

“I am thinking,” I said.